Picture This: Fading Light Over Tobermory

The falling sun pulls a sheet of light across Tobermory Bay in that scant moment between day and night. The parti-colored houses standing in a horseshoe around the dark water leap into saturated brilliance, the pink and red buoys and bright fishing trawlers drink in the twilight’s bronze dram. From the sea between Calve Island and the Morvern Peninsula, the Muileachs haul in the day’s catch, and the smell of fried haddock and boiled prawns tangles with woodsmoke and sodden earth in air that has, for once, gone still as a sphinx listening to the conspicuous absence of our “progress.”

Each moment of wan sunlight sends the world ever farther away, and the melancholy traveler’s soul struggles in its wake. For those who have lost their way, traveling is an act of sincerity, a displacement that stretches taut the myriad ties that bind us. Which ones will snap and wither? Which will hold strong? We cast ourselves upon the world like bobbers upon the water, waiting for that moment of submersion. Just as I’ve done here on this overlook above Tobermory as darkness crashes, hoping I might read some fate by the ties that hold.